Spies, lies, and war

Lessons of COINTELPRO

by Sherry Wolf

International Socialist Review,
September/October 2006

Surveillance and infiltration are weapons
in the arsenal of the state machinery-from dictatorships like
Egypt to Western democracies like the United States. How else
could minority elites hope to monitor and stifle dissent among
their exploited and oppressed majorities? Especially in times
of war, when the façade of diplomacy is lifted and the
true brutality of states is unleashed, a premium is placed on
silencing or crushing any domestic discord that threatens national
unity. War abroad, to put it bluntly, is always accompanied by
intensified repression at home.

This is the context of the political bombshell
dropped by the New York Times on December 16, 2005, when it exposed
the Bush administration's wiretapping and spying on thousands
of citizens and non-citizens through the National Security Agency
(NSA). The corporate media focuses on the narrow debate inside
the Beltway over whether or not the administration should be getting
easily obtained warrants before intruding on the privacy of citizens
and others. But part of the real scandal lies in the fact that
the supposed opposition party, the Democrats, are in full agreement
with the state's monitoring of e-mails, phone calls, and meetings.
As Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) put it, "We all support surveillance."1
As with the war on Iraq, the debate is over form, not content.

The American state has never hesitated
to break its own laws-or make up new ones-in order to spy on and
intimidate those who dare to disagree with its policies. Nor has
it hesitated to use the tactics of scapegoating and fearmongering
to further these aims. The post 9-11 hysteria against Arabs and
Muslims, the heated passage of the Patriot Act, the surveillance,
roundup, interrogation, detention, and deportation of thousands
of Arabs and Muslims, is just the latest round. The tactic in
each case is to target one part of the population, whip up hatred
and hysteria, and use the new political climate to justify using
similar measures against an ever-wider list of organizations and
classes of people.

The Espionage Act of 1917, and an amendment,
the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to "willfully utter,
print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or
abusive language about the form of government of the United States,"
punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to twenty years in prison.
During the Palmer Raids in the aftermath of the First World War,
the Bureau of Investigation-forerunner of the FBI-rounded up 6,000
radicals and exiled 1,000 foreign-born socialists and anarchists,
using these acts as justification. During the McCarthyite witch-hunts
of the 1940s and 1950s, a coalition of government bureaucrats,
employers, and right-wing activists hounded and fired thousands
of communists, leftists, trade unionists, and civil rights activists.
These legal suspensions of democratic rights, often initiated
by Democrats and almost always supported on both sides of the
aisle, were promoted in the name of defending national security.
Each time these activities expanded the scope of state repression.
Radical historian Noam Chomsky describes how following the Second
World War, Senate liberals including Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.)
and Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) proposed "the ultimate weapon
of repression: concentration camps to intern potential troublemakers
on the occasion of some loosely defined future 'Internal Security
Emergency. -2 Not much has changed since then. Don Goldwater,
son of the late senator Barry Goldwater and GOP candidate for
governor in Arizona, recently called for the creation of forced
labor camps for undocumented immigrants.3 The so-called liberal
media, such as the New York Times, which sat on the NSA story
for a year at the request of the Bush administration, applauded
the expulsion of a socialist assemblyman following the Palmer
Raids. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,
the Washington Post editorialized against "hairsplitting
over infringement of liberty. "4

A new generation of antiwar and social
justice activists needs to learn the lessons of the last wave
of state repression, spying, and infiltration. There is far too
much ground to cover on this broad issue than can be done justice
in the scope of a single article, therefore I've chosen to focus
on a few highlights [lowlights?] of the government's intervention
in the Black liberation and socialist movements in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.

What was COINTELPRO?

In 1971, activists broke into FBI offices
in Media, Pennsylvania, and discovered files that proved what
many had suspected for years-the government was involved in widespread
domestic surveillance, infiltration, and violence against radical
organizations and individuals. The Counter Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO), mounted by the FBI to "disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, and otherwise neutralize" the civil rights, Black
liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native-American, antiwar,
socialist, and New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s, is one
of the most notorious of the U.S. government's domestic anti-radical
programs. Most of what has been learned about government activities
against radicals was accessed through hundreds of thousands of
pages of previously secret documents released through the Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA)-though most information remains largely
censored and blacked out.

COINTELPRO was the brainchild of J. Edgar
Hoover, the founder and director of the FBI from 1924 until his
death in 1972. Shaped by the anticommunist hysteria in the aftermath
of the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, Hoover took part
in the Palmer Raids against radicals and spent the rest of his
life in the service of espionage and undermining suspected "subversives"
of every sort. Contemporary histories tend to focus on Hoover's
maniacal egotism and closeted homosexuality to explain his lifelong
fixation on repressing minorities who fought discrimination and
reds who challenged the status quo. But Hoover's agenda was embraced
by every president he served, including Democrats Harry Truman,
John E Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

The FBI, in close collaboration with local
police units (sometimes called Red Squads), used a number of techniques
in its efforts to disrupt and destroy leftist groups, the most
important of which are enumerated here.5

Eavesdropping. This involved not only
electronic surveillance, but also putting "tails" on
people and breaking into offices and homes, as well as tampering
with mail. The FBI's intention was not simply to gather intelligence,
but, by making their presence known in various ways, create paranoia
among activists.

Bogus mail: FBI agents would fabricate
letters, ostensibly written by movement activists, which spread
lies and disinformation. The Bureau sent many fake letters to
American Indian Movement (AIM) and Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders
and activists that were designed to sow confusion and division
in the ranks. The Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver wings of the
BPP, for example, were split after the FBI sent a number of manufactured
letters from disgruntled party members to Cleaver, then in exile
in Algeria, criticizing Huey Newton's leadership.

Black propaganda: The distribution of
fabricated articles, leaflets, etc., that misrepresented the politics
and objectives of an organization or leader, in order to discredit
the group or individual and to pit people and organizations against
each other.

Disinformation: The FBI often released
false or misleading information to the press to discredit groups
or individuals and to foster tension.

Harassment arrests: The police or FBI
often arrested leaders and activists on trumped up charges in
order to tie up activists in legal and court proceedings, drain
their financial resources, and heighten their sense of fear and
paranoia.

Infiltrators or agent provocateurs: The
infiltration of organizations by police agents served two purposes.
One was to gather intelligence on the group. Provocateurs were
used to try and encourage individuals to engage in illegal activity
that could then be attributed to the group as a whole; to disrupt
the internal functioning of organizations; and to assist in spreading
of disinformation inside and outside the group.

Bad-jacketing: This "refers to the
practice of creating suspicion-through the spread of rumors, manufacture
of evidence, etc.-that bonafide organizational members, usually
in key positions, are FBI/police informers. "6 The technique
was used to particularly deadly effect inside the American Indian
Movement. Talented AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash, for example,
who was murdered on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in
February 1976, was first subject to a successful whispering campaign,
initiated against her by FBI informant Doug Durham, who had joined
the AIM chapter in Des Moines, Iowa. Durham's role in AIM also
seems to have been to encourage AIM members to engage in "rash,
inflammatory acts," according to author Peter Mathiessen.7
Durham, for example, released "several unauthorized memos,
disseminated on organizational letterhead, indicating that AIM
was preparing to launch a campaign of 'systematic violence.""

Fabrication of evidence: FBI agents, police,
and prosecutors routinely fabricated evidence in order to obtain
convictions in criminal cases against activists. A number of AIM
and BPP activists, including BPP leader Geronimo Pratt and AIM
leader Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison for three decades
for a crime he did not commit, were convicted on such trumped-up
evidence.9

Assassinations: There is ample evidence
that FBI and related agencies played a direct role in the assassination
of a number of key radical leaders.

Who did COINTELPRO target?

While COINTELPRO was initiated against
the Communist Party (CP) in 1956, the program expanded to include
civil rights groups and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Parry
(SWP) by the time Kennedy became president in 1961 and his brother,
Robert, served as attorney general. In fact, Martin Luther King
Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March
on Washington, months before Kennedy's assassination, won him
the FBI designation as "the most dangerous Negro in the future
of this Nation"" President Johnson, while expanding
the war in Vietnam and rhetorically battling the war on poverty
at home, used the Black inner-city rebellions of the mid-sixties
from Watts to Detroit as a pretext to issue "standing instructions'
that the Bureau should bring the 'instigators' of such 'riots'
to heel, by any means at its disposal."'

Among the many targets of COINTELPRO,
the most serious attention was paid to those movements that most
threatened state interests. The most violent repression under
COINTELPRO was used against the Black Panthers, Martin Luther
King Jr., Malcolm X, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto
Rican independence movement. It was fueled by the state's need
to preserve the near total political and economic disenfranchisement
of people of color in the face of the first serious threats to
the racial status quo since post-Civil War Reconstruction. The
need of the American empire to keep Puerto Rico in its colonial
orbit, while it was losing the war in Southeast Asia, drove the
violent repression there and against Puerto Rican immigrants in
the United States.

The FBI was particularly concerned, according
to one of their memorandums, "to prevent the coalition of
militant black nationalist groups... prevent militant black nationalist
groups from gaining respectability.. [and] prevent the rise of
a black 'messiah' who would unify and electrify, the militant
black nationalist movement." 12

Despite the comparatively small size of
both the CP and the American SWP by the late 1950s and early 1960s,
their members' implantation in industrial workplaces, independent
electoral campaigns, desegregation, and antiwar activities, as
well as the bureau's fanatical obsession with "communism,"
made them targets. New Left activists who were not only hampering
the ability of the U.S. to fight in Vietnam, but also challenging
ideological assumptions about women's roles, sexuality, and segregation
garnered attention and harassment by the state as well. But the
most disruptive and violent COINTELPRO operations in the period
from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s were directed against the
Black and Native American struggles.

It was a general rule throughout the 1960s,
that local police departments would devote at least 1 percent
of their resources to surveillance and infiltration." These
local agents, acting in cahoots with the feds, read the leftwing
press and became familiar with the fact that organized leftists
were involved in liberal and pacifist groups and that individuals
were often radicalized by these ideas as well as by their own
experiences of struggle.

The modern-day surveillance of Quaker
antiwar meetings is reminiscent of FBI monitoring of the civil
rights formation led by Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1962, the FBI planted stories
in the news media about communist infiltration of the group and
King's ties to the CP. There were, in fact, communists and socialists
involved in the growing civil rights movement, several of whom
collaborated closely with King, and this fact was used as a convenient
attempt to discredit all desegregation activities in a society
that was heavily propagandized over decades against reds.

When King emerged as the nation's most
prominent civil rights leader and the movement butted up against
state resistance to reforms of its Jim Crow apartheid policies,
his political outlook expanded to embrace more profound structural
changes to eliminate poverty. The Bureau sought to find a more
suitable and pliant replacement for him. They expended tremendous
resources to tarnish King's reputation, and creatively edited
hours of wiretaps to produce an audiotape that presented King
as a philanderer. When it was announced that King would be awarded
the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent him an anonymous letter
encouraging him to commit suicide by threatening to release the
doctored tape. Most major news media, in this instance, refused
to take the bait. "

COINTELPRO's "Black scare"

While the origins of COINTELPRO lie in
the state's "red scare" obsession with curtailing the
activities of communists and socialists, the explosion of Black
radicalism shook the system to its core and gave rise to a new
and violent "Black scare." One hundred years after the
Civil War, the U.S. ruling class still relied heavily on the benefits
of a racially divided workforce and rigidly segregated social
order-formal in the South, de facto in the North. Any serious
challenge to that system would be costly economically and ideologically.

As left-wing Black historian Manning Marable
plains:

It cannot be overemphasized that the
Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were fundamentally working
class and poor people's movements. From the very beginning, progressive
unions were involved in the desegregation campaigns. The United
Auto Workers, United Packinghouse Workers, District 65, Local
1199 in New York City, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
all contributed funds to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Montgomery County
bus boycott of 1955-56 .... SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee] understood well the importance of Black working-class
support for the Civil Rights Movement and thus recognized the
need to develop an employment strategy for Blacks.15

The FBI swung into action to nip this
multiracial rebellion in the bud. Almost all of the above-mentioned
unions, organizations, and their leaders came under scrutiny by
the FBI and local authorities for engaging in constitutionally
protected activities. As early as 1960, the FBI began wiretapping
SNCC offices and the phones of its leading members. In the early
1960s, SNCC still adhered to its pacifist principles and collaborated
with the SCLC and National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) to fight segregation and register Blacks
to vote in the South.

Ghetto rebellions spread across the U.S.
in the spring and summer months from 1964-1972. A total of 250
people were killed, 10,000 were seriously wounded, 60,000 were
arrested, and billions of dollars were lost to local businesses
destroyed by the looting and torching. 16 These battles in major
Northern and Midwestern cities exposed America's dirty secret
that racial injustice was not confined to the former Confederate
states. Discrimination in jobs, housing, and education was deeply
rooted in Northern urban America as well. The new SNCC president
Stokely Carmichael gave voice to the deepening radicalization
in Black America in 1966, when he spoke at a Mississippi rally
and called for "Black Power. "17

Hoover and Johnson collaborated to try
and crush the deepening radicalization. Lists of "vociferous
rabble rousers" were compiled of "individuals who have
demonstrated a potential for fomenting racial discord.""
By 1968, 1,678 FBI agents were deployed each month to engage in
surveillance, disruption, and other activities against Black radicals
alone. The file for Malcolm X contained thousands of pages of
his speeches, wiretaps, and recorded activities by the time he
was assassinated in Harlem in 1965, in murky circumstances in
which FBI memos acknowledge the government's complicity. By fomenting
strife between Malcolm and his former comrades in the Nation of
Islam, the FBI aimed to achieve the outcome they got.

That was an early taste of the government's
strategy. Despite the fact that the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point
Program calling for self-determination, decent housing, and free
health care were all legal demands, their insistence on exercising
their Second Amendment right to armed self-defense led the FBI
to name it "the greatest [single] threat to the internal
security of the country."19 The mass appeal of the BPP-it
claimed 5,000 members by 1968 and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers-compelled
the FBI to launch a wholesale attack on it to discredit, divide,
frame, and murder its leadership. In Los Angeles and San Diego,
the FBI sent out anonymous letters to known gang members showing
the Panthers belittling or challenging the gangs, which led to
the assassination of local BPP leaders by the so-called United
Slaves. When BPP Chairman Bobby Seale and Minister of Information
Eldridge Cleaver organized a merger of the Panthers with SNCC,
the FBI used their infiltrators to set up SNCC leader Stokely
Carmichael as an FBI snitch. Carmichael was forced to flee the
U.S. for Africa and the coalition between these two powerful Black
groups was destroyed.

On December 3, 1969, the FBI launched
its deadliest assault on the BPP yet. An informant who was Chicago
Panther leader Fred Hampton's bodyguard provided officials with
a detailed floor plan of his home. Police raided his place and
murdered Hampton in his bed, and in the hail of ninety-eight rounds
of bullets, Mark Clark of the Peoria Panthers was also killed.
Police rounded up and beat Hampton's fiance, who was eight months'
pregnant, along with several others sleeping there, all of whom
were charged with "aggressive assault" or "attempted
murder" and held on $100,000 bail-though there were no signs
of any retaliatory shots fired .20

Police ransacked Panther offices from
San Francisco to Indianapolis, destroyed typewriters, stole files,
and ruined bulk foods stored for ghetto children's programs. Arrests
and frame-ups of dozens of members cost the organization $200,000
in bail money alone. Some remain behind bars to this day, while
others have spent decades harassed by law enforcement officials.
It's worth noting that despite the charges of violence against
the Panthers, years of surveillance and infiltration never turned
up hard evidence of criminal activities .21

The FBI's secret war on Trotskyists

Tomes have been written about the government's
eavesdropping and infiltration of the American Communist Party.
Far less is known of their COINTELPRO operations against the largest
anti-Stalinist socialist organization mobilizing in the 1960s,
the American Socialist Workers Party. The case of the SWP is of
particular importance not only because surveillance and infiltration
took place over decades, almost from its founding in 1938, but
because they turned the tables on the FBI and put the Bureau on
trial-and won.

In 1973, the SWP and its youth group,
the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), filed a lawsuit against the
federal government (Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General)
demanding compensation for years of disruption, harassment, and
surveillance of the organization. Throughout the course of the
discovery, trial, and other proceedings-which took place over
thirteen years-detailed information about how and why the government
violated the rights of lawful individuals exercising their free
speech and right to organize unfolded. In a historic rebuke to
the federal government's trampling on constitutionally protected
dissent, Judge Griesa awarded the SW $264,000 in damages in 1986.

COINTELPRO operations began against the
SW in 1961, when court records show they had around 600 members-10
percent were FBI informants who were paid in excess of $1.6 million
over the years for their efforts.22 Infiltration began in response
to the SW's electoral campaigns and desegregation activities-perfectly
legal undertakings. Over the years, member informants supplied
the government with membership lists, financial records, budgets,
minutes of meetings, mailing lists, and correspondence. From 1961-1976,
fifty-five informants held offices or committee positions and
fifty-one served on executive committees of the party. 13

The FBI played an active role in attempting
to discredit SWP candidates for public office. When John Franklin
ran for Manhattan borough president in 1961, and when Clifton
DeBerty ran for president in 1964, the two Black candidates were
smeared in the press when FBI operatives sent out anonymous letters
detailing minor legal transgressions from their pasts. To create
friction between Black and white members, the FBI would pen nasty
anonymous letters containing slurs like this one supposedly written
by white members to their Black vice presidential candidate in
1968: You and the "rest of your fellow party monkeys hook
up with the [Black] Panthers where you'd feel at home. "21

Disruption operations were often designed
to split alliances between the SW and its antiwar and racial justice
allies in movements. During a campaign to defend framed Blacks
in North Carolina, the FBI sent coalition leaders phony information
claiming that the SWP was stealing funds collected for the defense
campaign. When it was apparent that Malcolm X and the SW were
collaborating, the FBI spread ultra-left, anti-religious diatribes
supposedly originating from the SW among Malcolm's mostly Muslim
followers.

An FBI memorandum in 1966 explained the
need to "create disruption within the ranks of the SW,"
and to "hamper the party's... antiwar actions and objectives.
"21 When leading members Fred Halstead and Barry Sheppard
traveled to visit troops in Vietnam, the FBI planted incendiary
reports of their visit in newspapers read by GIs to encourage
violence against them by troops. After the explosive protests
outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968, an
anonymous letter was mailed to sixty-eight antiwar and New Left
groups attacking the SWP and YSA for their "cowardice"
in not fighting the police and warned the socialists to get out
of the antiwar movement. The letter did cause a stir inside the
party and made some members anxious about their involvement with
New Left forces.

By far the most disastrous and successful
efforts involved red-baiting. Due to the legacy of McCarthyism,
these baits claiming that the SW was "trying to take over"
or had a "secret agenda" played into the predisposition
of many activists. As with today's antiwar movement, the issue
of whether or not to support Democrats-whose party was the architect
of that war-lay at the core of many political disagreements. But
the political inexperience of many new activists mixed with the
machinations of the FBI to obscure any rational discourse and
reduce political disputes to charges against "Trotskyite
splitters and wreckers. "26

When the Student Mobilization Committee
to End the War in Vietnam (SMC) emerged as the major organization
against the war in 1968, the FBI intervened with anonymous letters
against the "Trots." A leaflet mailed to activists red-baited
the YSA for "committee packing and other highhanded crap
so neatly done by the Trotskyists."27 A debate inside the
SMC erupted over whether to press for a negotiated settlement
to the war, supported by liberals and the CP who were oriented
to the Democrats, or immediate withdrawal, supported by the YSA
and other leftists. The FBI exploited the debate to split the
group. Tragically, members of the CP who were part of the national
SMC leadership played into the hands of the government by submerging
the political debate into an organizational question. The antiwar
movement, which had previously opposed the exclusion of any member
of a revolutionary organization, shifted its stance. The YSA members
who were also part of the SMC leadership were purged when "it
was decided that no member of any political 'tendency' or group
would be allowed on the SMC staff. "28 The movement turned
much of its energies toward trying to get a Democratic "peace
candidate" elected that year, while the bipartisan war escalated
and continued for seven more long years.

As with the struggles against segregation
and for civil rights, the antiwar movement was set back by its
red-baiting. A generation weaned on anti-red propaganda at times
took the bait and allowed charges of socialist "opportunism"
to blot out all political judgment. This is a lesson this new
generation of activists must study if it is to avoid similar traps.

Some conclusions

The government claims that all surveillance
and other activities ceased after the exposure of illegal domestic
intervention by the FBI in the early 1970s, but this is a lie.
Throughout the 1980s, Central America solidarity activists in
the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador had
their offices broken into and files stolen. In 1990, two environmental
activists in Earth First!, Judi Ban and Darryl Cherney, were seriously
injured when their car exploded from a pipe bomb believed to be
planted by the FBI and police. They were awarded a $4.4 million
settlement by a federal jury in a civil rights suit.

Since the rise of the global justice movement,
and especially after the September 11 attacks, such surveillance
has been stepped up in the name of "homeland security."
For example, the Chicago Sun-Times cited a 2002 internal police
audit showing that undercover officers infiltrated meetings and
rallies of the Chicago Direct Action Network, American Friends
Service Committee (AFSC), the Autonomous Zone, Not in Our Name,
and Anarchist Black Cross, and recorded the proceedings on video
and audiotape. A special report by the Portland Tribune uncovered
police records showing that they monitor "groups ranging
from the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and Planned Parenthood
to the Sierra Club and the United Farm Workers ."29 Across
the country, judges have loosened up restrictions on such police
undercover spying and infiltration, which is now widespread.

Every capitalist state uses domestic surveillance
and repression against those who seek to challenge its policies
and power. Even the most democratic governments create legal loopholes
that allow them to suspend democratic rights when "national
security" is threatened, i.e., when their power and the propertied
interests they represent are called into question. As a general
rule, mass movements are least susceptible to repression when
they are on the rise, gaining strength and numbers, and the ruling
powers are on the defensive; they are most susceptible when movements
are weaker, more defensive, and less organized. When a movement
is rising, governments fear that repression will fuel rather than
smash it. The more clandestine forms of police infiltration, while
they can play a disrupting role, have never been able to claim
sole responsibility for the defeat of any movement or organization.

For while state surveillance and repression
are inevitable, they are clearly not insurmountable. FBI harassment,
surveillance and disruption of civil rights groups failed to prevent
this movement from achieving historic successes in the 1960s,
for example. The Vietnam antiwar movement also played an important
role, notwithstanding repression directed against it, in forcing
the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam. Police repression and surveillance
neither destroyed the Bolshevik Party in Russia nor prevented
the Russian Revolution from defeating Tsarism or creating a workers'
state in October 1917. On the eve of taking power, the Bolshevik
Party's leading delegate to the Russian parliament, Malinovsky,
was a police operative; the secretary of the main Bolshevik newspaper,
Pravda, between 1913 and 1914 was also a police agent. In Moscow
alone in 1912, there were fifty-five police agents operating in
left-wing organizations-twenty inside the social-democratic organizations.
The agent provocateurs were able to do damage, particularly in
helping the secret police identify and arrest activists. But in
order to maintain their position above suspicion, they were also
forced to engage in a great deal of useful work that helped the
cause. Moreover, because the revolutionaries organized on the
basis of a shared conviction, learned from their mistakes, and
continually sought to widen the struggle, they were able to operate
more or less effectively even in conditions of extreme illegality
that the Russian police state inflicted on them. As Victor Serge,
responsible in revolutionary Russia for unearthing and interpreting
the millions of detailed files of the defunct secret police, wrote
in 1925, "There is no force in the world which can hold back
the revolutionary tide when it rises, and that all police forces,
however Machiavellian, scientific or criminal, are virtually impotent
against it."50

History proves that the U.S. government's
pursuit of radicals was not largely for illegal activities, but
because reds have the politics, organization, and discipline to
tap into wider discontent and can influence struggles that pose
a potential threat to the status quo. Never underestimate the
foresight of the American state, especially during times of war.

That said, it is worth reiterating that
socialists along with everyone else have the right to organize
publicly and oppose the policies and priorities of this state
that they disagree with. The added attention paid to the Left
today is an acknowledgement by the government that there is growing
outrage in this country and there are forces, however small today,
that can play an important role in shaping the upheavals to come.
As these forces grow and have more influence in struggles, their
adversaries will try to discredit, divert, and divide them. This
begrudging "respect" from the class enemy is part of
being radicals living

in a capitalist state. But as history
also reminds us, when the rising tide of struggle does come, the
state's manipulations can be exposed, discredited, and overcome.
We do have one major advantage over our predecessors-we know what
the state has done and can do, and tens of millions of Americans
find state surveillance and infiltration of dissident groups to
be appalling. This is not a time to hunker down and hide, it is
a time to organize openly and confidently, but to keep our wits
about us and have a sober recognition of the state's practices.